Shell history: 2018 edition

28 November 2018

In what has become an annual tradition I have a very simple shell script that generates a frequency of my most commonly run shell commands. This year saw a pretty big change from 2017. The most obvious difference is that I use “git” more frequently than in the past. This is a tough one to analyze by looking at the data since my usage of oh-my-zsh skews the data. It provides a variety of git aliases - for example gp for git push and gco for git checkout - that appear elsewhere in the results so my pure use of “git” is almost isolated to the cases where I do a commit.

The other big difference is my aggressive use of the AWS CLI. I have seen my role shift to less of a coder and more in support of DevOps so this is reasonable. I’ve also made an effort to minimize my use of the AWS Console in favor of having quick and handy commands that give me quicker access to the information I need.

This was also the year I finally embraced Docker. Before this year I had never used docker
I’ve finally embraced docker. Before 2018 I had never used Docker and now use it on a semi-regular basis.

A few other interesting observations come from looking at the commands that only appeared in 2018. The first is “siege” which was a small load testing program I was messing around with earlier this year. The second was “rg” which while less powerful than grep does the simple searches much much faster.

This is an interesting exercise and I’d encourage others to start doing this as well. It really does give you a sense of how your terminal usage has changed and how it aligns with industry trends.